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Footprint

“The wordfootprint has taken on meaning,”
writes Michel Berger of Oakland,
Calif., responding to a recent query in this space, “beyond that of simple
circumstantial evidence that someone has walked by, as in Daniel Defoe’s
1719 novel ‘Robinson Crusoe.’ Where are those footprints headed?”

Computers, which usually don’t have any feet, take up room on a desk; they used to lie flat, leaving little room for a telephone, a spouse’s picture, souvenir coasters and other desktop doodads. But a generation ago, spaced-in designers thought of turning the machine on its side, making a “mini-tower.” When the University of British Columbia issued one of these space savers in 1992 to William Rees, that regional planning professor — working on a paper about “regional capsules” — recalls telling a doctoral student that he especially liked its “smaller footprint” on his desk. Then the idea hit him: “It took just a few seconds to replace every reference to ‘regional capsule’ in the paper with ‘ecological footprint.’ ”

This gave impetus to the March of the Metaphoric Footprints. Rees’s young
colleague Dr. Mathis Wackernagel is now the executive director of the Global
Footprint Network. Linguistic ichnologists track the trope back to 1965, as
“the proposed landing area for a spacecraft.” In 1979, a Senate
committee on energy described a proposal that would consolidate service, reduce
the number of employees and buildings, and thereby “remove environmental
footprint from Yosemite Valley.” In 2000, after global
warming heated up the issue stove, a spokesman for a Texas
electricity marketer told The Seattle Times, “It’s essential to
reduce our environmental footprint, and at this point in our world’s
history, reduce our carbon footprint.” Dr. Wackernagel informs
me that the phrase received “its biggest boost in 2005 through an enormous
BP
media campaign on the carbon footprint.” The New Oxford American
Dictionary’s word of the year for 2006 was the footprint-obliterating
carbon-neutral. A few months ago, The New York Times reported California
researchers asking “provocative questions about the carbon footprint
of food.”

Meanwhile, the military stepped smartly into the footprint parade: the Department
of Defense Dictionary defines the word as “(1) the area on the surface
of the earth with a satellite’s transmitter or sensor field of view; (2)
the amount of personnel, spares, resources and capabilities physically present
and occupying space at a deployed location.” As soldiers spoke of a security
footprint, politicians fell into footstep: a euphemism for withdrawal was
given a Pentagonian flavor by Senator
Jack Reed in his suggestion for “reducing our force footprint”
in Iraq.

But ecology will not abandon the footstep field. “Diapers Go Green” was the headline of a Time magazine article a few weeks ago, its subhead “Eco-friendly and cost-conscious parents are returning to cloth to cover their babies’ bottoms.” Natalie Brown, a Maryland mother of three, is quoted saying, “I’m not a huge green fan, but I love that I’m leaving less of a footprint.”

Perhaps Mrs. Brown will one day read to her children the novel of adventurous
loneliness by Defoe, or at least this verse from an 1838 Longfellow psalm: “Lives
of great men all remind us/We can make our lives sublime,/And, departing, leave
behind us/Footprints on the sands of time. . . .”

Combining Form Wanna Cracker?

The good nuptial news is that Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France, has tied the marital knot with Carla Bruni, the knockout Italian pop singer and model with whom he has been keeping unabashed company. Only last month, Time magazine joined the tut-tutters by prissily labeling her “presidential arm candy” and recalling her famous comment, “I’m monogamous from time to time, but I prefer polygamy and polyandry.”

These are wedding words that require differentiation. Monogamous is
simply “one in marriage,” from the Greek mono,
“one,” and gamos, “marriage.” But in what follows
the combining form polys, “many,” the lexicon of the mating
game trips many into misusage.

Polygamy is a marriage of a man or a woman to more than one spouse.
It is sex-neutral; the word can denote the marriage of one man to two or more
women, or one woman to two or more men, or any other combination that really
free-spirited or easily confused people can come up with.

Polyandry is the marital state of one woman to more than one andros,
“man.” That’s what the new bride of France’s president
once listed as one of her preferences but is not the state that she chose recently.

Polygyny is “the practice of a male having more than one female
mate at the same time.” That’s the rarely used word for which most
people mistakenly substitute polygamy.

Remember this, mates: polygamy is the general term for plural marriage;
polyandry means one woman with more than one male mate, while polygyny
specifies one man with more than one female mate.

Glad to clear that up, Mrs. Sarkozy, a semantic distinction conveyed with best wishes for a long and blissful monogamy. And as other mating combinations present themselves in the future, the world’s languages — especially those rooted in Greek — stand ready to meet the lexical challenge with fresh coinages.

Robinson Crusoe’s ‘Man Friday’ leaves his mark.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page MM20 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Footprint. Today's Paper|Subscribe